Christian Reilly

Christian currently serves as Manager of Product & Demand Management at Bechtel Corporation, working in a niche position between the business and technology delivery teams to help identify opportunities to drive worldwide innovation in the mobile and cloud computing areas. Prior to this, Christian was Principal Technology Architect at Manager of Global Systems Engineering at Bechtel. Having gained hands-on experience in 15 different countries designing and managing complex IT environments in support of worldwide project execution, Christian brings a wealth of enterprise experience and led a team that architected and deployed one of the world's first true private cloud infrastructures. Christian is one half of The Loose Couple Blog team and his disclaimer can be found here.

In the three weeks that have passed since being subsumed into the high-velocity Citrix machine, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time meeting with, and listening to, a broad range of existing and potential customers, both service provider and “enlightened” enterprise, as they work through the planning and delivery phases of their respective cloud […]

It’s quite amazing to think and reflect on that fact that I’ve been in the business of helping build big stuff for the best part of 16 years. When I say building big stuff, it’s not big, shiny new stuff like your Salesforce or your AWS but, y’know, real big, knock-your-socks-off awesome stuff like airports, […]

At the recent Gluecon event in Colorado, I was fortunate enough to run into my friend Sam Ramji from Apigee and took the opportunity to grab some time with him after he had delivered his excellent panel presentation which was intriguingly entitled “Globalization, Black Swans, and APIs”. It’s always great to bounce ideas and share […]

As I write this latest post, I’m somewhere over the US, cruising at 35,000 feet and hastily making vapor trails toward attendance at my first Gluecon event in Broomfield, Colorado. And you know what, I’m pretty excited too. Not only has Gluecon got a great lineup for 2011 and a promise of being an excellent […]

As I board the plane to head to Las Vegas for 2011′s Interop and Enterprise Cloud Summit, predictably, yet somewhat rhetorically, the great AWS outage post mortem continues to rumble on. Exactly two weeks after the event, blog after blog and article after article continues to serve up a veritable range of delights from the […]

It’s amazing, though not in the least bit surprising, that the recent AWS outage has generated such widespread attention, with a plethora of blog posts from customers to industry experts taking up pixel space across all corners of the globe. I think it’s fairly obvious to all that since the event, everything that needs to […]

If you’ve been following breaking developments in Cloud this past week, it will probably have included at least eleventy-six references to vmware’s Cloud Foundry announcement along with some excellent write ups on the topic – including this one from my Cloudave brother, Krish Submaranian and this, quite literally from the horse’s mouth, ex-Spring head honcho, […]

My incredible passion for anything related to aviation has burned an indelible problem into my existence. I have a recurring dream. It happens every few months, rarely with much deviation from the plot, yet it is guaranteed to end in the same way – me waking with a smile on my face. In the dream, I am wandering around the […]

I guess it used to be called “Stormchasing” – where groups of seemingly heroic, but clearly just plain stupid, raincoat-clad student types armed with an entry-level standard def video camera caught clips of each other laughing and shouting such ludicrous lines as “oh crap, Bob, it’s coming straight at us” as a 125mph wind got […]

There are fewer sobering moments in the life of a Principal Technology Architect (which is apparently my official new title) than returning from a trip to the crazy world of Silicon Valley and next day finding oneself standing before a room full of CISOs from some of the leading Fortune 100 companies, rattling off a […]

For those of you who are either generally interested or perhaps following from afar, it has certainly been difficult to miss the numerous goings-on within the OpenStack community over this last couple of weeks. In what could yet turn out to be the biggest soap opera to appear out of Texas since “Dallas”, there is certainly no shortage of drama – the […]

Warning: This is a long post. If you suffer from ADD (like I do) then maybe this one isn’t for you. Blink and you’ll miss it. No, not a shooting star, but the release of yet another celestial feature set delivered by the mercurial team at AWS. These days, it seems there is not a […]

Debates are fun, especially when you are jousting with such fantastic and respected cloud dignitaries as Chris Hoff, Adrian Cockcroft and Simon Wardley. Come on, I mean who wouldn’t enjoy a good natured, well intended, yet fierce back and forth about the various clouds and their various philosophies ? Well, March 12 was a day […]

Thursday, March 3, saw the simply brilliant folks at AWS shuffle another tantalizing step closer to persuading an Enterprise to move VMs to their burgeoning EC2 platform by making it as simple as taking candy from a baby. Say hello to the “EC2 VM Import Connector”. Immediately following the announcement, that broke, as usual, via an effortless tweet from AWS’ Jeff Barr, […]